Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Why do they call her Apostle Alexandra?”

“Because folks what meet her tend to have a very personal interview with the Lord not long after. Folks don’t rightly know what her Christian name is, or if Alexandra’s any natural part of it. Has a nice snap to it, it does, but not much for truth in it.”

“Surely people must know something.”

“You might think so, but no,” Yarbough said. “Hardly ever comes into town and only then visits a handful o’shops…buyin’ what she can’t make, I reckon. Even then she usually keeps a kerchief on.”

“So nobody can identify her face…” Sands mused. “That’s one hell of a story, Mr. Yarbough.”

“It’s probably been embellished a might bit,” Yarbough averred. “Folks ’round here don’t have much but the cattle and settler trade to sustain ’em, meaning a teaspoon of gossip does a tablespoon’s work.” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re not thinkin’ of seekin’ her out, are you? That ain’t the sort of thing a paperman’s built for.”

“Maybe not,” Sands said, finishing his whiskey and sliding the glass down the bar. “But that also means that no one else has tried.”

His frame was crippled by the poverty of his upbringing: polio in the legs, a touch of rickets in the upper arms, scoliosis due to malnutrition, and a laundry list of other debilitations. Yet his hands were as strong as any there ever were, and his eyesight keen, and those who heard him swore him to be the finest acoustic guitar player who’s ever lived.

In those far-off sticky summer days, he and his band would roam the Delta countryside, playing for whatever paying audiences they could find. The money was never more than a pittance, most of which went to offset the cost of care, wheelchairs, and the demands of nervous musicians afraid to be associated with a man many believed to be cursed. As was the case with many in those days, there were dark whispers that he’d dealt with Old Scratch, trading his physical strength for fiendish skill.

No one can quite agree on his ultimate fate, but all concede that his was a life cut short. Some maintain that he drank himself into an early pauper’s grave somewhere in the New Orleans wards. Other have him drowning when a riverboat capsized, dragging him into the deep buckled into a wheelchair. Darker tales speak of a midnight lynching when he bested a favorite son in a musical duel or when a stillborn and strangely twisted child was born to a local belle.

But his guitar…well, that went to Woody’s, the establishment where he played most of his gigs. It hangs over the stage to this day, still fully strung more than 70 years later. It’s been said that whoever can coax a tune out of it will have some fabulous reward; equally prevalent is the whisper of a terrible fate awaiting anyone unlucky enough to strum those cursed catguts.

Let’s find out, shall we?

The barrage was so precise that, when the powder-smoke cleared, the Ineffable‘s gunwhales and ports were clean, with nary a living soul to be seen. Those few survivors visible were rigging the sails for a getaway tack.

“Chain shot!” roared Black Ned.

“Chain shot!” the cry was taken up below, where the gunners of the Merciless Anne loaded their cannon with the lethal mixture of ball and chain. The deadly links exploded outward moments after, sundering the fore and aft masts of the Ineffable and leaving her dead in the water. Normally, a privateer with such a prize would be loath to destroy her–there were men who would pay good coin for a lightly-used frigate still in Royal paint–but Black Ned wasn’t interested in prizes.

“Hooks and planks!” he cried. “Make ready for boarding!”

Grappling hooks sailed out, drawing the two ships closer until Black Ned’s crew scrambled across, cutting down all in their path with ball and cutlass. Ned himself was at their fore, flintlocks blazing, and led the charge belowdecks. He burst into the captain’s cabin like an elemental force, unloading a miniature broadside of shot into its occupant, leaving him slumped across a Spanish treasure chest.

Black Ned kicked the man’s corpse aside and sundered the lock with a dagger. His eyes grew wide as he beheld the golden figure inside.

“Let that be a lesson to all who’d steal the captain’s rubber ducky!” he bellowed, holding the prize aloft and giving it an exultant squeak.

People called them the Smokers, and Keith had heard a variety of explanations for this.

Certainly they were no slouch when it came to ganging up on others to steal anything up to and including lunch money–quite capable of “smoking” someone in a pitched battle.

And there was no doubt that cigarettes were their stock and trade, sold or bartered to others, inhaled furtively when adults were looking and openly when they weren’t.

But the real reason–Keith suspected–could be seen when they drove up. And smelled. And heard.

The Smokers tooled around in a beat-up Detroit aircraft carrier from the 70’s, driven by the only one of them old enough for a learner’s permit; as it pulled up to the curb, it belched forth an oily and odoriferous cloud the likes of which was seldom encountered outside of wartime.

“Hey Anders!” one of them called. “Ain’t it a little late to be going to school?” Nevermind that Deerton High was in the opposite direction; the remark elicted raspy chuckles from the rattletrap’s interior.

“Then there is the art of inflated description,” Tarris said. “As long as something looks impressive enough to fit on the bill, people won’t check up on it.”

“I…see,” Trish replied.

“Example: what would you call this?” Tarris held up a stapler.

“A…stapler?”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong!” Tarris cried. “It’s a prototype spatial mass driver. Mass driver because the staples, as physical objects, have mass and are driven. Spatial because the spatial properties of the paper sheets are altered in that they become attached. Prototype in that it possesses features no other stapler can boast–in this case, and American flag sticker and glitter.”

Trish picked up an old itemized invoice from the desk. “So what’s a Multi-Function Interoperable Heavy Secret Defender?”

“Soundproof office door,” Tarris said. “Helps with impromptu jam sessions.”

“Laboratory Configurable Stellar Atmospheric Light Secret Dropship?”

“Model airplane. Really flew!”

“Short-range Sub-space Civilian Transport?”

“Volkswagen Jetta. It actually has a pretty decent range.”

In those days, clockwork automata like the Mechanical Turk were all the rage. And while many, like the Turk itself, were elaborate hoaxes, many automata were quite real and capable of a range of action and motion astounding to many in the modern day (who consider our forebears to be stupid and backward to a man).

It’s said that the finest of the Renaissance automata came from the Vienna workshop of one Conrad Hutzdorf. Hutzdorf created elaborate machines capable of simulated motion when wound, figures with an internal asbestos bellows which would “smoke” before delighted patrons, and even–based on a request from the Emperor himself–a mechanical nightingale like the one in the stories, whose chirps were produced by panpipes concealed in its base.

Hutzdorf maintained no apprentices as befit expect a craftsman of his station; those few who worked with him made only specific parts to order. Many speculated on the reasoning for this, but Hutzdorf maintained that he preferred to do the work himself, and his patrons did not seem to mind the 6-8 months needed to create each piece.

The craftsman disappeared around 1779-1780 when his workshop was gutted by fire. No body was ever discovered, nor was a cause for the blaze determined, which gave rise to wild speculation in alehouses and parlors throughout town. The most prevalent of them had a patron brashly breaking into Hutzdorf’s workshop after having a commission refused, only to find the craftsman with his chest opened and making adjustments to his own clockwork mechanism! Enraged, the clockwork Hutzdorf reputedly set the fire that wiped him from history and fled elsewhere.

Stuff and nonsense, of course, but an interesting piece of historical background for the Hutzdorf piece that was to appear at our auction house in Philadelphia.

For although the bardic tales are littered with stories of fire-breathing wyrmkin, they but scratch the surface of these creatures’ fascinating natural history–with their long-ago extinction, now all but lost to us moderns.

To be sure, many breathed fire, but they were only a lucky few. Most of the great serpents did lack the specific combination of forebears and kismet to ignite their breath, relying instead on foul stenches, acids, billowing steam clouds, or–the the most part–strong jaws and an agile neck.

Flight was similarly a trait only the most fortunate of the great wyrms posessed, and many lacked the power even with wings. Far more chose to take to rivers and lakes, rocky crags, or mountain passes to buffet on ill-starred passersby.

Consider the case of Smallmaw. He could only expel a blast of air from his mouth, which was too constrained to rend and tear a grown man, and whose stunted wings could not support flight. Yet this wyrmkin rose to be among the most feared in the British Isles before the Roman invasions purely on the strength of the one aspect our legends accurately describe: a deep and cunning intellect.

“And so we release you, mighty Holaak-Hliqu, that you might rain fire and destruction upon our world!”

“Why is it that these faux-Lovecraftian elder gods always have such loyal cultist minions?” Lia asked. “It doesn’t seem to me that they have a very good benefits package.”

“They get eaten first, and spared the insane ravages of That Which Man Was Not Meant To See,” Jim replied. “Lesser of two evils.”

“But the Elder Gods are always released due to the cultists’ actions,” Lia said. “Why not just leave them sealed in the dark cave of Un’Pro-Noun’Cible? The ersatz Great Old Ones in the movies are never going to return on their own like in the real Lovecraft.”

“Maybe that part got left on the cutting room floor.”

“Or maybe they needed a lot of extras for the rock-jawed hero to blow up real good before the final confrontation. I tell you, it just doesn’t add up.”

Jim shrugged. “Well, the next time we come up against a murderous cult of insanity-worshippers, I’ll point out the contradiction.”

“Yes?” The man said. His eyes remained closed, and nothing save his mouth budged from the position of thoughtful meditation it occupied.

“I was just wondering, sir, if you could give me directions,” Jarl said, craning his neck to address the man atop his rock.

“That depends on where you want to go,” the man said evenly.

“Hoborg,” said Jarl. “I need to go to Hoborg.”

“You must reach within yourself, to find that you already know the way to Hoborg.”

“I…wait, what?” Jarl said, cocking his head. “No, I don’t know the way to Hoborg! I wouldn’t be asking if I did!”

“Would you now?” the man asked. “Would you indeed? Perhaps you simply do not know what it is you know.”

“You’re messing with me, aren’t you? Just trying to shoo me away with a lot of nonsense?”

“Perhaps.” The last ‘s’ trailed off into a low hiss.

“They call this creature the Mana Cricket, even though it’s really more of a grasshopper,” said Spinelli. “It feeds off of arcane essence ethereally siphoned from other living beings.”

The insect alighted on Gibbons’ arm and began crawling around. “Hey! That tickles!” she squealed.

“Now, one Mana Cricket obviously isn’t going to do much, and is easily squashed,” said Spinelli, adjusting his uniform cap. “Happily, they’re rarely seen in groups of less than 1,000.”

Dozens more large blue grasshoppers descended on Gibbons, causing her to emit a series of shrill not-quite-screams, not-quite-laughs. They crawled over her, apparently benignly; she didn’t reach for the pistol in her holster or attempt to summon a fireball.

“Of course, even a thousand–or hundred thousand–Mana Crickets can’t kill you,” Spinelli said.

One by one, the grasshoppers alighted, leaving Gibbons alone and swaying. “I don’t feel so good,” she moaned.

“But what they can do is drain you so completely that it will take days for your natural arcane essence to rejuvenate, and in the meantime…”

A door in the arena opened, revealing an immature ghast which promptly charged Gibbons, its knuckles dragging through the dirt. She gestured with her arm, apparently expecting a fireball to spring from her fingertips; when none was forthcoming, she could only utter a startled “Ugh!” as the ghast tackled her.

“Don’t worry, it’s been declawed and defanged.”