Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The city was beautiful at night. At precisely 7:00, the lights would switch on and shine into the darkness, creating an island of light. They glinted off the calm waters of the bay, they cascaded over the low buildings, and they cast eerie shadows on the hill overlooking the city. One structure in particular, tall and thin, cast a gigantic dark line over the hill and the complex of buildings perched atop it. Because of this, the inhabitants called the whole area “the Stripe.”

And standing on the Stripe, illuminated from ahead by the city lights and behind by the rising moon, stood a lone man, a sentinel. A casual glance would’ve revealed nothing aside from his alert pose, but a more discerning observer could’ve noticed his sharp military tunic and the rifle slung over his shoulder. A cigarette, its tiny glow accentuating the contours of his face, completed the picture.

He’d been on watch for hours, and wasn’t to be relieved for another three. No one in his unit wanted the graveyard shift; it was dull and cold. He always volunteered for it, though: the graveyard shift was quiet, and nothing ever happened. The “sunshine shift,” however, was another story. The guard smiled, thinking of his mates dealing with the crowds that invariably formed around the compound gates. Along with jeers and insults, the malcontents usually threw stones too.

It was odd, he thought. His unit guarded the Stripe, but no one knew what it was they were really protecting. He had his own ideas, of course, but they were of the un-soldierly type: research lab, weapons development, government offices, and so on. That was one odd thing about the job, the guard thought again. No one knew what they were guarding.

A sudden movement to the right caught the sentry’s eye. Unslinging his rifle, he took one last puff on his smoke and crushed it with his bootheel.

“Who’s there?” he demanded.

As if in response, a loud clatter sounded to his rear. Whirling around, he fired blindly into the darkness. Cursing himself for wasting ammunition, the guard fumbled for his flashlight. Its brutal, high-powered beam revealed a metal can, old and rusted, lying on its side with a bullet hole through it.

He’d only been staring at the can for a moment when he heard a soft but distinct “whump” behind him. The guard turned, only to see that a small dart had embedded itself in his forearm. He yelped and ripped it out, trying to illuminate it with the flashlight’s beam. Even as he did so, his eyes began to water, and a feeling of calm passed over him. He struggled to aim as a figure stepped into the beam, but collapsed in a heap as another figure appeared at his back.

The day’d left as it’d come in: hot as hell and twice as stuffy. Anyone with the cash and the knowhow had their AC on, which meant a moment of disorienting fog when passin’ from inside to out.

Jake gave his sunglasses a thoughtful rub and replaced ’em. Some people said he’d be a damn fool to wear sunglasses at night, but he always enjoyed the sheen they threw over the world–amber ‘n hyper-real.

Outside, it was silent and dead. Not a whisper o’ wind nor a soul to be seen, not even a car windin’ down the access road. Only flashes of distant lightnin’ did anything to break the calm.

Jake hefted his umbrella over one shoulder. There was gonna be trouble that night. You could feel it in the air, see it in the sky, hear it in the buzz and chirp of the nearby marshy patch.

Yep, there was gonna be trouble that night. And Jake aimed to start it.

Mikey was going to come up with something that his brother couldn’t explain.

During the long, late summer days they often spent together in the house, waiting for their parents to come home from work, Mikey would flit from TV to bookshelf in pursuit of the new and the interesting, drinking in hours of programming on Dad’s favorite channels and leafing through the family’s handsome encyclopedia set. It was an exploration of the rawest kind, filled with new wonders and mysteries, and he would always burst into the living room, where Dave was usually camped with a comic book in the nook of one arm or hunched over the family computer.

“Dave, did you know that there’s a whale that grows a horn like a unicorn does?”

Dave would look up. “Yeah. The narwhal. I touched one of those horns once, in a museum before you were born. Go back and watch your kiddie shows.”

“Dave, did you hear about the lost colony they had in Virginia? They disappeared hundreds of years ago, and nobody ever found them!”

“Wouldn’t be much of a lost colony if they found it, would it?” Dave would respond. “Roanoke didn’t disappear, they were starving. Went and lived with the Indians. Some of them still have blue eyes, you know. Now leave me alone.”

Time and again, some great discover or fantastic mystery would be delivered to Mikey, and time and again Dave would swat it down with a casual hand. There wasn’t a thing Mikey could say that his brother couldn’t grab and squeeze and wring the magic out of. Sitting there, thinking he was so smart and so wise—Mikey was sick of it.

They were playing this beautiful waltz when we first met.

I don’t even know how we were invited to that cotillion, full as it was of glitz and glamor and last names tracing back to the Mayflower. But we were, and both standing aloof, when the live instruments struck up the tune. The next thing I knew, we were together, lost among the beautiful melody and motion of the moment.

Even after the original, volcanic “us” became the prosaic, everyday “we,” I still think of the waltz when I see you. But I never did learn what it was called, even though I can still hum it to this day, and often do.

I’ve hummed the bars I can remember to the few musically inclined people I’ve met on my travels, always to the shaking of heads and the shrugging of shoulders. Over time, the trail grew fainter as the day to day took its toll on what had once been. Sometimes I think that the impromptu waltzes that sometimes break out in the kitchen, untrained voices substituting for clarinet and string, are the one thing that we can still share unadulterated by the pettiness that so often creeps into our lives.

So when I heard those lilting strains drifting out of the old State and across the street, I had to investigate. I had to know, though sometimes I now wish I had continued on my afternoon walk.

“Lower!”

The helicopter bucked and dipped in the volcanic wind. “We’ll be torn apart!” Jesse cried.

“Lower, damn you!” Lowell slipped out of his harness and into the cargo hold, sliding the door open.

He could see her on the low slope below, lit intermittently as lightning arced from the dark clouds overhead.

“Anne!” he cried.

She shouldn’t have been able to hear him over the whirring blades or the death throes of Kjeho’s peak. But Anne looked up, her soot-streaked face breaking into a frightened smile.

Lowell was down on his stomach, hand outstretched, as Jesse brought the chopper as low as it could go without landing.

For a moment, Anne seemed torn, as if she were considering leaving herself to die rather than take Lowell’s proffered arm. Then her hand was around his wrist, and they were airborne.

Seconds later, the ground collapsed as the side of Kjeho blew out, rushing toward the sea in a massive pyroclastic flow.

“Hang on!” cried Lowell, as Anne dangled from his grasp over a scene of unparalleled devastation.

“Aliens, fantasy, in-jokes,” Gary sniffed. “Kid’s stuff.”

“We all knew that when we signed on,” said Ken. “People love our games, and they’re willing to show their appreciation by buying them.”

“I’ve told you this again and again: they were always a means to an end. Always a way to get our foot in the door so we could do something meaningful, something that’ll change the world.”

“You don’t think a line of video games about wisecracking gnomes is world-changing enough?” Ken said.

“We’re being serious here, Ken,” said Gary. “I wish you could be too.”

“I am being serious,” came the reply. “A relational database made by a video game company…that’s the joke.”

“What you don’t understand, my friend, is that the veneer of civility is paper-thin. Easily torn, easily mended, easily discarded.”

Logain squirmed in his chair. “Enough with the ten-dollar words, flatfoot,” he said. “I got rights. I said I’m not tellin’ you nothin’, and you can’t keep me here ‘less I get a lawyer or you get a judge.”

“My, my, we have a constitutional scholar on our hands here, boys!” Detective Richat cried to his fellows, who responded with low chuckles. Richat removed his hat and overcoat; their brass accouterments clanked on the steel table as he laid them down.

“Yeah, not all us west side boys are complete rubes,” Logain said. “Let me go; you can be surprised later.”

One of the officers handed Richat a box from Dulley’s Floral Shoppe on State, which he cradled.

“It may be the thought that counts, but I don’t think you’re my type, detective,” Logain said, batting his lashes.

“I’m going to give you one last chance, my friend, before the veneer is discarded,” said Richat. “What did you do with Mr. Berkeley’s book?”

Logain, in response, slowly and deliberately raised his middle finger.

Richat whipped an M1913 cavalry saber out of the box and severed Logain’s outstretched finger in a single fluid stroke. A dirty rag served to muffle the prisoner’s screams.

“Oh, not the whole world,” the demon said, daintily sawing at its nails with a file. “But for everyone inside the Bijouplex, it’ll be the Book of Revelations. The end part, with the fire and such, not the boring intro.”

“Why tell me this, then?” Irv asked.

“Pure sport. Every few decades my lads do a little bit of Armageddon here or there. You know, to keep our hand in. But it can get a little dull–screams and seared flesh and the like. So every now and then we’ll make things interesting by telling someone about it and watching them scurry about trying to do something.”

Irv was on his feet. “You mean I can’t stop it?”

“Did I say that?”

“Well, can I?”

“Perhaps,” the demon grinned coyly. A whiff of brimstone filled the room as it exhaled. “But you’d best be quick about it. Look Who’s Oinking begins at 5:10, and there won’t be any theater left for the 7:30.”

The thing is, Harry de Vries was all show. Oh, he looked mean, and he was big enough, and long hours under the hot frontier sun had given him the leathery consistency one expects of a shootist. But the fact was, de Vries was myopic, with everything more than four feet away rapidly fading rapidly into colored blurs. Spectacles were out of the question–who’d ever heard of a shootist using spectacles for anything but reading, and de Vries was illiterate.

Nevertheless, through intimidation, bluff, and bravado, de Vries had been able to establish a fearsome reputation in the territories. Not enough that he could completely do as he pleased, but enough that free drinks were often poured, free nights in the bordellos were not unknown, and anyone who knew his name would think twice about irking him. Few had the stones to challenge someone so ornery-looking and weathered; fewer still had cajones enough to stand de Vries down when that big Schofield came out of its holster; no one had noticed that the aim behind it wasn’t true. So Harry de Vries was a big man about the mining settlements.

All without firing a shot.

Then there was Hanson Everett. He could see clear as an eagle on a sunny day, but something wasn’t quite right upstairs. His own mother had said so after finding Everett hunting for rattlesnakes as a boy, letting them jump out and bare their dripping envenomed fangs before bringing a rock down on their skulls. As an adult, he recklessly sought out danger wherever it presented itself–rustling single cows from the largest and best-guarded herds, picking barroom fights, and generally flapping his gums.

Oh, there had been beatings aplenty, and more than a few stints in local jails. But Everett was smart enough to lie his way out of many predicaments, and he was good-looking enough to disarm many would-be antagonists with a smile (any attempt to refer to him as “Handsome” Everett inevitable led to bloodshed, however). The way Everett figured it, he was like a piece of pig iron in the forge, with each hammer blow making him stronger and bringing him closer to being something to really be feared. And then…well, watch out, territories.

Everett and de Vries met in the Holyoke Saloon in Dunn’s Crossing just short of midsummer; neither would walk away from the confrontation.

“My contact was very clear on this: the gold, mined from Tanganyika colony, was real, and substantial,” said Harrison.

Joy shrugged. “What of it? Any gold the Germans had would long since have been seized after the war.”

“Not quite. Gustav Bernhard, the German Colonial Secretary, was in the midst of retrieving that trove when war broke out in 1914. They say that it went to the bottom of the ocean when his cruiser was lost with all hands at the Falklands, but I have reason to believe they secreted the gold on a Pacific island during their trans-Pacific voyage.”

“Not this again,” Ishi moaned.

“The way I see it, we can either cut anchor and head out now–when no one else would think to look–or we sit on our hands and wait for the Japanese to sweep in. Unless you’d prefer that.”

“I was born in San Francisco, ass,” said Ishi. “To the Imperial Navy, I’m as American as Douglas MacArthur.”