Inside this book...

     "Oh, my prince, since you ask me," said the girl who appeared out of nowhere at the edge of the glen in which I suddenly stood, "since you ask, it's time to root out the evil necromancer in the castle ruins and restore the olive groves once he is gone. You have been chosen for this quest, because you brushed your hair this morning with one of those hairbrushes that feel really nice when they stroke your head. It has thin plastic rods with little plastic knobs on their ends. You know the brush I mean. And that's a dumb criterion on which to choose you, but I couldn't think of anything else on such short notice. I'm not the kind of schoolgirl who does her homework every night. The teacher gives too much of it, so I don't see the point. It's my life. I have much more worthwhile things to do than to memorize facts, which I'll never need or use, just for a grade! Then do it all again? Oh no. That's not for me. If the task intrigues me, I'll do it, yes! But if I look at something and make the determination to ignore it, so I do. I might say I did it when I did not. But why should I do that? Better to read books, the ones I wish to read, and to learn what I will. The necromancer did it for evil, but I read for good! So I have a head on my shoulders. And since my parents are always in the field tending to the crops, or making practical things indoors when it's cold and the growing season is done, I feel no shame in neglecting the sorry legacies of murderous tyrants. the weekly vocabulary test though, you'll notice I ace every time. For I love words like aspidistra and turncoat. And words are ever useful. I dare say I'll be an ingenious writer one day. I've already started telling stories. I can't do a lot of them yet, but give me time, Henry! So do you agree to go rid us of the necromancer? It might not be too difficult if you can tell stories. Such things work on his mechanical mind. And once he leaves, he'll never return. He's not the sort of villain who says Never mind. When he leaves, he leaves for good. Also, he's showed signs of crabbiness lately. The knights who have preceded you managed to toss out notes with some revealing information in them before they perished. Their reports show how deadly dull the necromancer has been finding his sojourn. One night reported that this necromancer known as Snarg Ghoulgob had pulled out all but three strands of his nasty ghoulgob hair as he stormed about on top of the high castle wall. Another knight noted that Snarg, the enemy of peace, did nothing all night but shout insults at anything that moved, including the wind. And that he shook all over with vexation and maladaptation. He couldn't figure why the devil the necromancer stayed on at the castle ruins when he was so dissatisfied with his environs. The third knight, who like the other two, one can only assume was trapped in the tower and consumed by fire, slung out a rock with a bit of parchment tied to it that revealed Snarg was seriously considering, of his own evil designs, wedding the spider beast known as Ugia, if she would be his, even though that hideous monster of blindness who never leaves the dark recesses of various abandoned diamond mines in Africa (and often ones that had seen a demolition that blocked the usual way from the shafts to the surface) had had a score of partners before, all all of them, save one that she made her slave, she'd eaten alive on their wedding night, having poisoned her victim with a wine of blood and venom, then laid flat for weeks, as toxic spirits emptied her wicked mind of all memory of him. Whilst fully sated, she extended her hairs and tentacles outward, to feel out the world for her next possible mate, whom she always called, 'My seemingly best and freshest one for the black covenant of my gray smog gunk.'

     "To make good on her conquests, she relied on her slave and thief, Mike Johnson. The thing about Mike was that he was obsessed with Ugia, and when he saw she couldn't return his twisted form of loyalty and lust in any other way than to dub him slave, he accepted his fate with a wrenching, twisted snarl, and made it his business to comb the world for likely victims for his beloved, as Ugia promised him (and it was the only promise she ever kept) that her tenacious viciousness would do away with anyone he might send her way. Perhaps he fantasied that one day she would come round and desire him with all the black rottenness of her gross innards. But even if she didn't, he was content to serve as accomplice to the destruction of rivals, in support of his beloved's legacy of death and destruction. It proved a lasting if lurid partnership, as with every conquest to her name, Ugia advanced her position and status at the head of the low table of the cruel and conniving menaces of all time. So Ugia's place in history wreaked of a fiendish devilry, with a long list of terminated brutes to her name. Most recently she had devoured a certain war crimes perpetrator who had headed up a nation and been responsible for the death of millions of civilians, only to be disappeared himself by Ugia. She was bloated anew from the blood feast, and had already forgotten him, as she slobber-craved for the next punk to master.

     "She mightn't have long to wait either. After scouting far and wide, the obsessed Mike Johnson came to report that there was a most devious and brutal necromancer, with more than a little discontent, rottenness, petulance, and obstinance eating at him, who had bloodgot his reputation as a killer of noble knights, spoiler of gardens, and nixer of architectural ruins perambulators and pleasant evening amblers, who would be the perfect one for her to share her bed of web with, as she slowly poisoned his body and ate him bite by bite, while he, Mike Johnson, her devoted slave, looked on, enthralled by her fangs, and enraptured by her awful power and supremacy over every creep the world had ever known.

     "Ugia's mouth stretched long then, in a hideous broken smile, as she scratched Mike Johnson across the face with a talon of her nearest leg, drawing blood, and making them both feel the extent of her reach and command."

     "Okay. Got it," I cut in. "Go see Snarg Ghoulgob and persuade him to go with Mike Johnson, who will guide him to Ugia's lair, where he'll be destroyed by said Arachne. Simple? Risky? I wonder. Except I think I may already be dead. Only, what have I got to lose if it could enhance my reputation? I could curry favor with the people, rejoin the world, come into a life worth living, find a woman, and either keep the other side of the curtain or lose it. Just thinking out loud here, um, what's you're name, little girl?"