Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“The problem for me was the necroplasts,” said the first judge, Cindy Wailing of the Ghouliard Culinary School. “There were just too many bitter souls of the damned, and it overwhelmed the rosemary and sage.”

“I disagree,” said the second judge, Eternos Slumbre of the Corporeal Spectre eatery on 5th and East. “I would have liked more necroplasts to help balance the sweet tartness of the chutney.

The third judge, Betty Wight, simply howled.

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“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “I think Pricklefist is a perfectly reasonable name for a pineapple.”

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PRAISE ALL BITMAPS!

Praise be unto the GIFs, the JPEGs, the TIFFs, the PNGs!

Praise be unto the rasters, the vectors.

Praise be unto the halftones, the dithers.

Praise be unto the black-and-white, the greyscale, the RGB, the CMYK.

For, without them, we are BLIND.

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Ostia is the perfect place to hide from somebody like me.

It’s abandoned, thanks to…well, you know. But not for so long that everything has been looted. If you know what to look for, there’s still food to be found that won’t give you a writhing death from botulism. Even batteries, if you’re lucky.

But that particular skeleton of a city is rapidly getting popular now that most people fancy that the danger is past. Oh, you’re still not allowed in, and the roadblocks will turn you back. USUN will shoot you on sight, though they don’t stray from the roads and certainly don’t get anywhere close to the outskirts.

So I wasn’t surprised to learn that my quarry had fled there. In fact, I relished it. With a typical bounty, the chase is half of the fun. In this case, with our history, it was more like the delightful final chapter to a long book, or the last moves in a long chess game. I intended to enjoy it to the full.

But only one of us was coming out of there alive.

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Hamid waved his receiver. “Signal coming in, boss. Satellite phone. Text only.”

“Don’t call me boss,” Ali said. “It’s demeaning. Call me Captain.”

“You’re the boss, boss,” said Hamid.

Ali snatched the handset and looked at it. “Foreigners sighted at following coordinates. Westerners. Lax security. Apparently excavating something.”

“Sounds like a good chance for us,” said Hamid. “Kill some interlopers, maybe take some hostages, get some artifacts for Khalid to move. They’re paying cash for hostages and artifacts in Raqqa.”

Ali nodded. He’d come out to the desert to do something with his life. He couldn’t be content running his father’s dry-cleaning business in Hatay. But in the eighteen months since he’d slipped south to join the Caliphate, there had been nothing but dusty patrols, slim rations, and a steady supply of contradictory orders from the higher-ups.

It was time to prove that he wasn’t a screw-up.

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The Sick Party in Rm. 445

This one’s a little different, since nobody who witnessed it still works at the Hotel Palmserston but you can find it in old city papers.

On Halloween, 1970, a group of people checked into what was then a double, room 445. Their plan was to go to a masquerade in town but split the hotel bill. A total of 8 people went to the room afterwards, and ordered room service. They also had a lot of candy, since a mock “trick or treat” event had been held at the masquerade.

The room was left a huge mess, and the people who had to clean it ate some of the candy that had been left in the room. Within a day, everyone who’d eaten something on Halloween night was in the hospital suffering from life-threatening sepsis. Of the 8 people who had trashed the room, one died and one had to have a length of intestine removed. Everyone spent months in the hospital.

Survivors tried to sue the Palmerston, saying that they had been poisoned by the room service food. But no one else who had eaten in that night–onw of the kitchen’s busiest–got sick, and it’s devilishly hard to catch sepsis from a bad meal besides. And none of the maids who’d eaten the candy got sick, so that couldn’t have been the culprit.

In the 1990 renovations, rm. 445 was split into two singles, 445 and 446. But to this day, no one wants to deliver food to either room because of what happened 40 years ago. Luckily, as far as anyone knows, nobody’s had room service or Halloween candy in there since.

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The 3:14 AM Flushes

Plumbing for a hotel the size of the Palmerston is incredibly complex, but since 2000 the hotel invested heavily in a completely new system that gave every room a new low-flow but high-pressure commode.

It also seems to have disturbed something in the plumbing system other than water or sewage.

A computerized master system keeps track of water usage in the Palmerston, and it routinely goes rather quiet after 1am or so. But according to the people who monitor it, a toilet somewhere in the hotel flushes every night at 3:14pm sharp.

It never seems to be the same toilet twice in a row, though the same ones have been active repeatedly at 3:14. It seems to affect the units regardless of their age, too. The occasional housekeeping staff that have encountered the phenomenon report being scared to death, too, by the sudden noise.

No one can say why that late hour seems to trigger random flushes, but one thing is pretty clear: they never happen in occupied rooms.

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