“Why does the maintenance guy have to drive to Wisconsin?” Ethel asked.

“For a part,” said building management. “I explained that to you yesterday.”

“And my hot water’s still out. He’s gotta drive to Wisconsin because they’re the only state with the legal clearance to sell valves? What the hell?”

“Please do not take that tone with me.”

“Please fix my hot water! My dishes are stacked to the ceiling and the cats are having competitions to see who can scale Mount Pantserest the fastest.”

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Arthur sprawled across his couch in the dark with the air conditioning blowing full blast. He’d had a crappy day at work, today his soon-to-be-ex-wife had taken the rest of her stuff out of the house, and he intended to relax.

A voice whispered in the dark.

“I dropped an eldritch poison in your whisky,” it said.

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“Please don’t go inside,” Carly muttered under her breath to a cluster of teenagers who joked with each other on their way to the funhouse. “It’s not safe don’t go in.”

“What’d you say, lady?” one of the teens asked.

“I said, may I see your tickets,” she said, lying through her teeth as her boss ventured over. They’d kept her under tight surveilance ever since they discovered her discouraging people from going into the funhouse. But they couldn’t fire her, because then the secret would get out. Only her binding employee contract kept her bound to the power of the denizens of the funhouse and kept the secret safe.

“Sure, here they are,” the teen said, showing her the tickets.

“I’m sorry, these are counterfeit,” she said, examining them until her boss had left.

Or until he’d hidden behind a cutout of a ghost. He sprang from his hiding place and snatched the tickets from her grip.

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“You order six hundred and sixty-six candles?” Angela asked, her face a rictus of horror.

“Yeah,” said Jezebob, walking in with one of the boxes. “You said that you needed a lot of candles.”

“I needed those candles for the Christmas Mass!”

“So? I didn’t order scary black ones,” Jezebob said, dropping the box with a thud.

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Part of a Series. The first entry.

Laura bounced around in the jungle, swinging through the boughs of the highest trees, carelessly using her prehensile tail to balance as her hands and hand-shaped feet slid from vine to vine. Earlier that morning, while scraping some termites out of a mound with a stick, she had seen a flash in the sky, brighter than the two suns above. She heard the crash in the distance.

Now Laura glimpsed the pod, shining white against the bottom of the deep green canopy. It had burned through several webs of vines but had cooled enough that it hung suspended in a bundle. The metal went ping.

As she clambered around the pod, she noticed that it was entirely smooth except for a small, concave set of thrusters, the type used on deuterotrident drives. An ancient technology, and curious to see it used instead of her society’s own hurlotronic inertia rockets.

The door opened with a hiss as the atmospheric pressure equalized, and out emerged some sort of monkey, except from the shoes that it wore it appeared to have some sort of duck feet.

“What the hell are you?” Bertram said, startled, around a mouthful of red licorice that he was eating.

A second duck-footed monkey, significantly curvier than the first, emerged.

“It appears to be a native lifeform,” Helena said.

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“Our rents are too high!” said Wriggles, the president of the Zombie Tenant Association. “Most of us have been forced to pass our fortunes on to our survivors because of the necrophobes that have ruined society!”

“Look,” said Pickenplotz Poriander, who owned the cemetary, “I’m as low as I can go. This is valuable real estate and thanks to your lobbying I’m already barely scraping by. I already can’t dig anymore graves!”

“Barely scraping the money off of our decaying bones, you mean!” replied Wriggles.

Pickenplotz gestured out across the rolling hills of the cemetary.

“This is a graveyard, I’m supposed to be concerned with attracting new clientele, not supporting the old ones. I could stabilize rents, at least for the coming year, if you could convince some zombies to move into the vaults, or convince the older members to join the Ossuarians in the very fine Ossuary.”

“Trying to shirk your responsibilities in supporting our agreement, eh? That is the basest form of commerce. Back in my day, two hundred years ago, you stood behind your product through thick and thin!” Wriggles said.

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