By Falco Rockbert
Today, the NRPD busted a “sweatshop” that employed ghosts
to write paranormal teen romance novels around the clock. The NRPD were tipped off by the strange
noises coming from the basement of the Stivenson Building on Gerhard Street in
Little India.
“It was an unusual sound,” said Officer Laura
Carter. “I was parked next to the
building, checking my computer when I heard it.
The only way I can describe it was unearthly.”
Inside, a trio of necromancers, Lawrence Constatine, Mary
Woolen Cloverfield, and Cantor Merlinson the Mighty (real name Jason
Dinkleman), magically held over 100 ghosts in front of laptops. They were startled by the NRPD and couldn’t
cast a spell quick enough to protect them from the officers’ clubs and pepper
spray. When the ghosts were freed,
several of them floated away, but the majority remained with the police to
explain the situation.
“They forced us to write terrible paranormal teen romance
novels,” said the ghost of Larry Stephens, a grocery worker who died in
1965. “I didn’t even know this was a
genre until they locked me in here.”
The necromancers supposedly took the novels the ghosts
wrote and sold several of them to publishers under the pseudonyms H.M. Marley,
J. Georgia Carolina, Paul Pryorman, and Tristram Shandy among others. According to the ghosts, they were
responsible for over 30 published novels, including Love Bite, Werewolfopolis,
I Heart Zombie, and The Yorkshire Hemophiliacs Society
series. The publishing houses that
bought the books did not comment.
“I’ve never written anything while I was alive,” said the
ghost of Janice McDunnon, a farmer who died in 1943. “In fact, I could barely read and write. Back then, women didn’t always get such a
good education like they do these days.
But it didn’t matter to them none.
They just wanted more books, and it’s not like we need to sleep or eat
or nothing.”
Indeed, it appeared that the three necromancers took
shifts during the day, and there were at least two more necromancers according
to the ghosts. The only breaks the
ghosts got were to upload their manuscripts to a main server. “This whole bloody affair was just awful,”
said the ghost of Winston Cobblepot, an English hotel owner who died in
1891. “Do you know how many damned
vampire romance novels I had to write?
Twelve! When did vampires become
romantic? Vampires are terrible, awful
creatures that ruin your village, decimate your livestock, and tip horribly.”
Despite the enslavement, the necromancers may get off
easy in court. Ghosts are not a
protected class in the legal system, so technically, no laws were broken. But they could face up to 1-3 years in prison
if the publishing houses were to press fraud charges. As for the ghosts themselves, they were free
to go complete whatever task they needed so they could finally rest in peace. All left except for one lone ghost who kept
typing at his laptop.
“Oh, that’s T.S. Eliot,” said the ghost of Winston
Cobblepot. “He was the only one who
never complained, but they never took what he wrote. He could never quite do what they wanted,
that chap.”
