Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

In October 1918, a carrier pigeon was dispatched from the 8th Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division of the American Expeditionary Force, which was fighting in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. The missive, which was sent in anticipation of being cut off by a German counterattack, informed the AEF headquarters of the situation and requested reinforcements. The pigeon never arrived; it was assumed to have been shot by a sniper or downed by a trained pigeonhawk, and in the end its message was not necessary–the 9th battalion had moved in support of the 8th without orders, and the German flanking attack was repulsed, albeit with heavy casualties on both sides. After the war, the pigeon, which was named Frou-Frou, was written off as killed in action and the incident was forgotten.

However, an unconfirmed report from 1919 that appeared in several newspapers suggested that the message was eventually delivered, albeit in a most surprising way. According to the Manhattan Tribune, on May 1, 1919, a battered and bedraggled pigeon appeared at the military squab roost in Camp Didimus, the military depot on Long Island where large numbers of military animals had been bred, trained, and husbanded during the war. Camp Didimus, which closed shortly thereafter in June 1919, had trained or furnished over 10,000 pigeons, 25,000 horses, 100,000 mules, and 50,000 head of beef cattle for the war effort, in addition to a smattering of military dogs and ship’s cats.

According to the article, the bird was Frou-Frou, who had somehow flown across the Atlantic against the prevailing winds to return to its birthplace to deliver the message. It wasn’t unheard of, either then or now, for a homing pigeon to fail to imprint on a new roost and to attempt to return to an old one, but the distance and difficulty of the flight impressed commentators, who held the bird up as a dedicated and loyal, if not particularly bright, combatant. The message, which was intact, was duly delivered to the Army, where it reportedly caused General Pershing much amusement.

The story diverges from this point. The Manhattan Tribune claims that Frou-Frou died shortly thereafter of exhaustion. Conversely, the Brooklyn Bulletin reports that a certain Capt. Smith took the bird into care as a family pet. The Newark Bugle had Frou-Frou being returned to its roost and surrendered to the large pigeon corps, having found a mate despite the hardships.

Ultimately there are no contemporary records or interviews to confirm the events–but it has nevertheless gone down in history as one of the longest and most unexpected pigeon post journeys in military history.

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Ingrid Inkbottle, the Weird Woman of the Weir, sounded a long, low note on her gourt horn to summon her jack o’minions back to her. At the sound of the supernatural gourdnote, the lumbering contraptions, with heads of pumpkin and bodies of scarecrows, lumbered back to her. Barely noticiable amid the decorations for the harvest festival, they were Ingrid’s most treasured spies, largely because they were cheap and easy to make.

Before long, three of the jack o’minions had arrived, clanking up to the door of Ingrid’s cottage. The enchantment was such that the magic animating the pumpkin-men would dissipate
on their dismissal, and the ambulatory vegetables longed for oblivion, seeing life and consciousness as an unwanted imposition.

“You there,” Ingrid said to the first. “Dish.”

In a raspy, hollow, echoing voice, the jack o’minion responded: “Sophia the stable girl is with child. Rumor has it that the father is not her husband, Ronald the baker, but rather Sean from the hay barn.”

“Ooh!” Ingrid squealed. “Juicy. You are dismissed.”

“Finally.” The jack o’minion collapsed in an inanimate heap.

“You there, what gossip do you bring?” Ingrid said to its fellow. “Auntie needs her stories.”

“The vicar is ill with a mysterious malady,” the second said. “Three doctors have been there and the first two have been sent away muttering about venereal disease.”

“Love it,” Ingrid said. “Get out of here.”

“Thank you,” sighed the creature as it crumpled.

“And you?” said Ingrid.

“Miss Matilda and Miss Prudence have been avoiding each other despite their lifelong friendship,” said the jack o’minion. “It has been noted and commented upon.”

“Not good enough,” said Ingrid. “Go back out there and find out more.”

“Please, mistress,” the gourd begged. “Release me.”

“Bring me juicy gossip and I shall!” Ingrid said.

“But to what end, mistress? What will yo ueven do with it?”

“Nothing,” Ingrid said. “Nothing at all. It just gives me something to occupy my twilight years in between books. Now go!”

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“Okay, I give,” said Harris. “Why do you call your neighbor’s produce vampire cabbages? The Ghost Squad™ has been over them with a PSImeter, and infrared mass spectrometer, and a holy water vaporizer, and there have been no results. To say the State Department of Supernatural Botany is displeased would be an understatement.”

“Oh no, you have it all wrong, Inspector,” said Baron Vladislav von Blüt. “I said his cabbages were vampires because they suck.”

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If one was to assign human feelings to the cushion–which we will not, since it was wholle inanimate–one might imagine into have had a bitter past, as it had previously been set aside for the exclusive use of Squirt, Aunt Augustine’s beloved pomchi, and true to his name he had visited every kind of indignity upon the cushion that was possible, and a few that may have been invented solely for the occasion.

Once Squirt–and his successors Squirt II and Squirt III–had passed away and Aunt Augustine went into care, she had used the cushion as a support during her struggle with IBS in her twilight years. Again, were the cushion to have a mind or a memory–which it did not–it might have rejected the indignity of the situation. Upon Aunt Augustine’s expiry, the cushion went to Cousin Marybelle, who had used it as an experiment in washing and re-covering older cushions as a sacrifice before trying the procedure on her own, beloved, living room set. Find it a success, the cushion had gone into the white elephant gift exhange as a “new” item.

This led the cushion, which would have been seething with resentment had it ever been sentient, which it had not, into its current circumstance of sitting on the Guest Couch in Great Aunt Agnes’s sitting room. If anyone had known its history, and known the powerful hatred that would have been coursing through the utterly and intirely inanimate object, might have thought twice about sitting there.

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“Okay,” said Stratos. “The next applicant for the American League of Justice is…Skylark.”

The door of Fort Justice slid open to reveal a youngster in a blue and brown superhero outfit, with the brown parts being a surprisingly faithful representation of a Eurasian skylark’s colors.”

“Okay,” said Stratos. “I’m Stratos, God of Storms, and these are my associates Shieldmaiden Womazing and The Being.”

“Pleased to meet you all,” said Skylark.

“Yeah. Okay. It says here that you were bitten by an ‘atomic skylark’ and gained the ‘proportionate powers of the same.’ Walk us through what that means.”

“Well,” Skylark said, “I can fly.”

“As well as a skylark can?” asked Womazing. “To like 300 feet?”

“Well, I’m 10 times larger, so I can fly to 3000 feet easily,” said Skylark.

Stratos, who could fly to the height of the International Space Station, looked at his co-jedges and raised an eyebrow. “I…see. And you can…sing?”

“I can sing ten times louder than a skylark, proportional to my size,” said Skylark proudly.

The Being, whose voice at its loudest could shatter concrete at 200+ decibels, pursed its lips. “Tell us some other…lark powers…you have,” it said.

“Well, I can build a nest that is large enough for several humans and strong enough to resist moderate attempts to destroy it,” Skylark said. “I can perch on surfaces without needing to flex or rest, and can sleep standing up.”

“I’m gonna go ahead and stop you there,” said Stratos. “We’ll let you know, okay?”

“Great!” said Skylark. “Thanks for your time!”

The three members of the ALOJ conferred once the door was shut again.

“Very unimpressive,” Stratos said. “Reject?”

“There’s something there,” countered Womazing. “Flight and sound are moderately useful.”

“Certainly not for front line hero duties,” countered The Being.

“Oh, no. Of course not. No, I was thinking like…a local or regional team. Great Plains League of Justice, maybe.”

“I hear the Justice League of Lincoln, Nebraska has an opening now that Huskerknight has retired,” Stratos said, tapping his cheek.

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The Professor’s experiments with animagnetism continued, and after making a magnetograph of one of the crows in his yard, he was able to craft his most sophisticated creation yet.

Using a series of broken and blank keys obtained as a job lot from a local tinker, the Professor was able to craft an animagnetic field in his cyclotron, based on the magnetograph, that resulted in a raven that assembled itself out of keys, with the metal being used as feathers around a hollow core. Though the Professor was able to add a tin whistle of his own design to allow the creature to approximate a crow’s cry, the metal rendered it too heavy to fly, though it would reverse its polarity to hover and “fly” through the Professor’s lodestone drome on occasion.

The keyraven was intended to be the first of a number of animagnetically created creatures, culminating in the first homo magneticus or magnetic man. Indeed, a number of magnetographs were taken for this purpose, including a cat, a dog, a horse, and an unidentified human long thought to be the Professor himself. But problems with the process soon revealed themselves.

For one, the magnetic field was self-sustaining but would fade over time and had to be periodically replenished in an expensive and time-consuming process. For another, the powerful fields tended to attract other ferromagnetic objects in unsafe and unpredictable ways, requiring the Professor to clear his magnetic lab of all iron and steel, relying instead on earthenware, wood, copper, and brass at great expense. The sheilding of the magnetic equipment, accomplished through a procedure not yet fully understood, was reportedly especially expensive and time-consuming. Worse still, the Professor’s other experiments, not all of which dealt with ferromagnetism, were so disrupted by the animagnetic work that they had to be held in a seperate building halfway across the estate.

For this reason, after the Professor’s sudden death at his desk due to heart failure, the other academics and intellectuals retained to examine his work were at a loss to explain, understand, or build upon it. The heavy contents of his lab, built into the structure itself, were ultimately left to rot.

The key crow, the sole animagnetic being known to exist, was recharged several times by the Professor’s housekeeper, who had learned some of his secrets through discreet observation. But upon her death of tuberculosis eighteen months after her employer, no further work was possible.

The key crow dissipated about two years after this, having gradually shed its “feathers” and lost its mobility over time. While some drawings and sketches exist, the crow’s unique and intense magnetic field meant that it was impossible to photograph, as the delicate internals of cameras were destroyed and film corrputed by the process.

Indeed, until the rediscovery of the Professor’s work decades after his death, his theories of animagnetism were widely dismissed as a hoax or sensationalism.

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With time, the mechanized and impersonal nature of warfare and oppression was such that the classical gods of the underworld found themselves much put upon to cope with the demand. It was thus that Hades himself sent out a missive to his fellow divines, far and wide, begging their aid in processing the multitudes and offering their choice of boons or rewards in exchange.

Minawara, the legendary ancestor of the Nambutji tribe, volunteered to meet Hades’ call. Refusing all recompense, he did it as a pure volunteer, as the Nambutji had been so sadly reduced in number by the colonists flooding into their ancestral lands that there was little for him to do. Leaving his twin Multultu to watch over the Nambutji alone, he reported to the underworld.

By all accounts, Minawara discharged his duty faithfully and steadfastly, despite the surprise of many souls seeing a kangaroo hop forward to weight their fate. The only note of annoyance in the tale comes from Hades himself. The old god, though eternally grateful, did complain that Minawara was being too harsh on the colonial Australians that were coming through his purview, disproportionately condeming them to Tartarus.

“When you have seen the way they treat my people, my children, perhaps then you will understand,” came the reply.

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“I apologize for the meanness of my hospitality,” said the old man. “But it is quite the process to serve a spirit a hospitable high tea, as they deserve.”

“Tell me, what is the long and short of it?” the shade inquired, politely.

“Well, first, I would need the ghost of a teapot. Surprisingly difficult to procure. One might think that all teapots that have been tossed out in the rubbish would have ghosts, but no, as long as they still work in the slightest there is no spirit that has left them.”

“Suppose you took a teapot and destroyed it,” offered the spirit.

“Aye, that would do it,” agreed the old man. “But that would bring about a vengeful ghost of a teapot, you see? It would be disquieted, resist the pouring. Perhaps even evil. No, we’ve to find a teapot that breaks after a long life of warmth in a loving home, but one that isn’t for the rubbish. That’s rare enough. But even then, not every teapot rises after it has poured its last.”

“You speak with great authority,” the spirit observed.”

“Aye, well, for many years it had been my pleasure to serve a spectral high tea to those spirits that found their way here. That is, until an infernal poltergeist broke my ghost teapot.”

“If I may,” the spirit inquired, “from whence does the ghostly tea come?”

“That’s a long tale for a strong stomach,” the old man laughed. “I’ll tell it, but believe you me when I say you’re better off not knowing.”

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Hooray, hooray, hooray
It’s Capitalism Day
Where everyone buys and sells
The workers in retail hells
An unhealthy amount of the year
Is fiscally spent right here
We should probably pull it back
But it might break the economy’s back
So we dash and we spend
Right up to the end
When the world is consumed by flame
But we shall take no blame
Hooray, hooray, hooray
It’s Capitalism Day

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“The object is clearly artificial, but it is radiating virtually no waste heat despite its size,” said Kiril. “Our instruments are not equipped to properly observe something of this nature, but I can make some guesses. If needs must.”

“How’s this for a guess?” said Josef. “How big is it?”

“Ten thousand kilometers diameter, at least,” replied Kiril.

“Impossible,” Alexei whispered.

“That’s what I myself said, especially given the lack of readings from the object,” said Kiril. “However, there is a simple way to confirm it. We can adjust our course and enter orbit around this unknown object.”

Alexei looked toward Josef. “It’s your call.”

“We already know where Neptune is. It’ll be easy enough to find again. Make the course adjustment.”

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