Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

There are some things frat boys are not meant to know.

That had always been the excuse given by the sisters of Lambda Qoppa Delta for the strict prohibition on guests, boyfriends, and photography at their annual Spring Fling. They went to an undisclosed location in the wilderness outside of town for a weekend, carrying enough supplies for a grand feast, and returned woozy on Monday.

To Wesley McCall of Phi Qoppa Beta, the isolation and supplies meant only one thing: the Lamb Qops must have been engaging in a salacious, girls-only free-for-all. As such, one year he followed them into the woods.

It was easy enough; he loaned his car to his Lamb Qop girlfriend and it had GPS tracking software installed. With a borrowed Land Rover, not to be confused with the Land Rover he had loaned out, Wes tracked her to a location deep inside Lauryn Ghantt State Forest. The dirt road was blocked off with a chain bearing a stern-looking park ranger warning; Wes cut the lock with bolt cutters and opened it himself. He hadn’t gone to all that trouble to go home without laying eyes (and camera lens) on ribald frolicking Lamb Qops.

To Wes’s surprise, after a time the dirt road turned to well-maintained asphalt, and he came across a parking lot that wouldn’t have been out of place in the suburbs, cunningly laid in and around the lofty pines so as to be all but invisible from the air. He slid his vehicle into an empty space, distinguished from the other Beemers and Land Rovers only by its lack of Lamb Qop bumper stickers. Keeping to the trees, and dressed in neutral tones, Wes continued on foot.

Streams of Lamb Qops dressed in bright colors and bearing coolers were flowing along brick-paved paths to a pine-hemmed hollow. Wes recognized the figure on a raised dais therein as Beryl Sawyer, the Lamb Qop housemother, but he did not recognize the ornate robes she wore or the midnight-black stone from which the dais had been hewn. Unlike the robes that the brothers of Phi Qoppa Beta wore during imitation (and hazing), Sawyer’s robe glistened with an unearthly sheen that gave Wes a headache.

“Sisters of Lambda Qoppa Delta!” cried Sawyer. “We have come together in the spirit of sisterhood to make our offerings in the abode of our patron. Let all among you who would call yourself Lamb Qops display your true colors proudly!”

Wes was delighted to see that the assembled girls immediately began removing their colorful sorority shirts (which formed a uniform so strict and standardized that even the Prussian Imperial Guard would have been envious). But there was something underneath – different shirts, bearing different slogans, in a script so fiendishly twisted that it blurred the edges of Wes’s vision just to behold it. And the colors! They were no hues that existed or could exist in nature, brighter and more pastel while at the same time luminous and ruinous, like holes torn in the fabric of a sane universe.

If the script made Wes’s vision blur, the colors threatened to draw the very breath from his lungs and lay him flat upon the pine needles.

“And with your true colors displayed, bring forth your offerings to our patron, the dread lord Rnyugnatlath! Can you feel it, sisters? Star-Spawn of the Infinite Void, the Creeping Conundrum, It Whom Human Tongues Fail, come forth at the call of your faithful on this spot where our offerings to you have lain since the time before time, the world before the world!”

When the first appendage of dread Rnyugnatlath emerged from the howling void on the dais, the ceremony was interrupted by the soul-shattering screams of an interloper in the woods. Wes was found a week later, raving in gibberish, his hair a white shock and his body sunburnt across his face and the palms of his hands. What little remained of his life was spent in the Granath Nulty Asylum.

There are somethings frat boys are not meant to know.

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