Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The French ship Sentinelle first charted the island and found it ringed with coral reefs that prevented approach. They named it Guardian Island after these structures and abandoned any attempt to land there. They were merely the latest in a long line of explorers to seek, and fail, to make contact with the people of the isle. Those reefs, plus Guardian Island’s isolated location in its archipelago, allowed it to escape the notice of Mughal emperors, British traders, Japanese invaders, and Indian unionists alike.

When the technology for surmounting the reefs became available, the Guardianese violently rejected all contact, repelling any landing with spears and arrows. They are, near as anyone can tell, the last completely uncontacted indigenous people in the world, direct descendants of the first modern humans to emerge out of Africa who have occupied their island home continuously for over 50,000 years. For this reason, India has abandoned attempts to contact them, reasoning that to do so could wipe the entire population out through disease.

The only extant source on the Guardianese are their neighbors, the Awaraj, who are of the same stock but inhabited larger islands and were therefore contacted. The last full-blooded Awaraj died in 1922, though many islanders share some Awaraj ancestry; the last surviving family was interviewed before succumbing to typhoid. They claimed that the Guardianese rejected contact for religious reasons, believing that their gods had descended from the skies in the time before time in tiny suns and given them an item to guard.

When asked what that item might be, the Awaraj simply laughed and said that the Guardianese had refused to describe it.

Bleary, Jenny raised her head from the nest of wrappers, cans, and napkins on her desk. The clock said she’d been out for nearly two hours, and the open wordfile on her laptop still blared its humiliating message:

Page 19/19. 5862/5867 words.

“Holy hell,” she breathed. “I’m doomed.”

It had seemed like such a lark earlier. Jenny had heard of the International Book Authoring Event (InBoAuEv or “In-bow-ev” to those in the know) years ago, and it had always seemed like just the thing to soothe her restless writer’s soul, to put an end to all the starting and never finishing she seemed to do. The event’s challenge–write 200 pages or 80,000 words of a book, whichever came first, in the space of March–seemed eminently doable when broken down to six pages a day. And, indeed, Jenny had blazed through twelve pages in that first day.

But then the horror started. Characters lost their motivation and refused to behave, wandering aimlessly in Jenny’s mind’s eye. Her outline broke down in key places. Vacuuming the apartment or surfing internet cartoons gobbled up the time carefully allotted for writing. And now, five days in, she felt like a drowning sailor after a shipwreck–ironic, given that her tale was a modern-day pirate story.

“What’s it going to take to get this thing back on track?” she cried to no one in particular.

She was about to find out.

“Every one of them?” the apprentice asked.

“Every last one down to the pets.” Katalya shrugged. “You did not expect the company’s best fixer to be so bloodthirsty? We are not delivering flowers, Manya, but death.”

“Yes but…suppose they have children? What’s the harm in letting them live?”

“Banish all such thoughts. They are unbecoming of our profession, where one must have a chip of ice where one’s heart ought to be,” Katalya said. “My mentor, Andrei Nagant, once let a 12-year-old girl survive a job because she reminded him of his own daughter. Do you know how he was repaid for his kindness?”

“A somewhat shorter stay in purgatory?” the apprentice said.

“Cute,” Katalya said. “No, he was killed fifteen years later. Shot in the back in Maputo by that very same girl he’d spared. She had devoted her entire life to finding him and avenging her parents. Andrei’s stupidity and sentimentality caught him in the end. That is why I say every last one down to the pets, Manya. If that is disquieting to you, perhaps you are in the wrong line of work.”

High Road from Khartoum was a classic larger-than-life adventure tale, one of the great Paramount Technicolor epics from the 50’s. Richard Burton and Rock Hudson had headlined a star-studded cast as British refugees fleeing the Seige of Khartoum during the Mahdist Uprising. It was really nothing more than an elaborate adaptation of Mason’s The Four Feathers with modifications to keep from paying royalties and rewritten to appeal to a postwar audience, but the film had influenced countless others with aspects of the final charge scene in particular appropriated by everything from Zulu to Star Wars.

And Collstein wanted a new adaptation on his desk by Monday. In the old days they might have called it a “remake” or a “re-imagining,” but he called it a “reboot,” that detestable buzzword that implied sweeping away decades of cinematic history was as easy as turning over an old Presario.

I glanced wearily over the producers’ notes. They insisted that the time frame be updated to the present day, that the suicidal charge be modified into a triumphant victory, that the two-dozen pursuers be upgraded to a massive (CGI) army. The Richard Burton character, a retired Army captain, was to be rewritten as a wisecracking photojournalist so the role could be played by a popular rapper who’d lobbied for the part. I was required to work at least of his songs into the film in a diagetic manner. The Rock Hudson part, perhaps appropriately, was to be female and written for the latest pretty young thing to come out of Australia (covering her native accent, of course). There was also a detailed combat requirement: three major firefights, two airstrikes, and a body count of at least 100. I was given leave to use the “f-word” exactly once to guarantee a PG-13.

“There isn’t enough coffee in the world,” I sighed.

The worst part wasn’t that people were always in a hurry and often in a bad mood. Janelle was used to that; such was the tempo of modern life when the outside world had finally caught up to what had long been the airport norm.

No, the worst part was people’s tendency to select an item, pay for it, and then leave it on the counter.

Janelle’s superiors at Schuylkill News and Convenience were very clear on one point: save on one of her 15’s or lunch, there was no leaving the store, no exploring Metro Airport.. So there was never any chance of reuniting an item with its departed owner, who had probably long since departed for another continent. Be it water bottle, Coke, cell phone power cord, or James Patterson page-turner, it would sit forlornly behind the counter for two days before being released for resale.

Sometimes the person would come back, often livid with recrimination. “Why didn’t you tell me I left my water bottle here? I paid $2.50 for it!”

“They don’t let me leave the store,” Janelle would reply. People would usually mistake her honesty for sass.

Indeed, it’s not often that two cars of similar power come together on the road, and less often still that both drivers are in an equal hurry and take equal affront to being passed.

So when that BMW passed my new Audi on the right, it was on.

Accelerating to pursue is one thing, but a true master of the automotive duel uses the terrain to their advantage. A long curve in the road can by a few seconds, but the real trick is to pin your nemesis behind an 80-year-old or, better still, a truck. Putting on steam to get just close enough that they can’t swing in front of you, and then watching gleefully as they have to break and fall behind…few rushes in the workaday world can equate. Better still if there are cars in the passing lane behind you to put up a buffer.

We dueled all the way, for the entire hour and a half, trading advantages several times. In the end we were neck and neck when I reached my exit; I saluted my worthy adversary by giving them a jaunty salute.

With a single finger.

Culbertsen had laid a chain of spells about the summoning circle, which Anya perceived as glittering spiderwebs in the air. Glancing at each filled her mind with images of what snapping that gossamer string would bring, brought into her waking consciousness by the gentle, patient voice of the brooch. One would open up a fissure around the circle; another would call down a discharge from the stormclouds circling overhead. Still another would rouse the dead buried as part of the circle’s construction, murderers all slain in cold blood and buried with silver arming swords.

But Culbertsen hadn’t reckoned with the brooch.

Anya snapped each thread as she crossed it, and the brooch hungrily devoured the magical energy stored within each trap and contingency. Even the circle itself, which would normally present a barrier impassible to all whose blood was not part of its phylactery charm.

Culbertsen turned as Anya penetrated the barrier. The physical component of the summoning was clasped in one hand, but in the other was something wholly unexpected–something against which the brooch had no power: a handgun.

Johanssen took a fresh puff from his cigar. “Phantasms are manifestations of residual emotional energy, kid. That means when you get right down to it, they spring from the human mind. And as anyone ought to know, the human mind is a seriously messed up place. God really should have taken that one back to the blueprints.”

“Like what?” said Adrian.

“For example: the more agitated you are, the more emotional energy you put out and the more likely it is to stick around,” Johanssen said. “So a lot of the really fun phantasms tend to be associated with old mental hospitals. A drooling lunatic with paranoid delusions puts out major emotional wattage in the same padded room for twenty years, you’ve got a good chance of a phantasm. He croaks, you’ve got a good chance of a motile phantasm. Best of all, there’s a strong chance the phantasm will take the form of something from the nutjob’s coconut.”

Adrian crossed his arms and looked at Johanssen expectantly. “You’re not going to just leave it at that, are you?”

In fact, it was clear from the fire in the old man’s eyes and the rate at which cigar smoke belched out of him that he’d been tearing at the bit to share ever more. “This one time we were called in to sweep a San Fran kookhouse. Found a whole nest of ’em. Loquacious bunch, too: Gil got them talking. There was the Chosen Sloth of the Beginning, which came out of a paranoid delusion of a luminous treehanger that was going to remake the world in its own image. Then you had the Banjo Skeleton, which really doesn’t need a whole lot of explanation. And the Disco Colossus of the Drive-Through…well, maybe when you’re older.”

Having a worrisome disposition and an introspective bent, my mind likes to keep itself busy by staging existential crises in moments of downtime when I ought to be relaxed or otherwise blase. I call these “Holy Shit” moments.

Standing in the express line at Metromart behind a pair of sorority girls with far more than ten items and a series of credit cards that kept being declined, without even a rack of tabloid magazines to glance over, my mind decided it would be a good time for a “Holy Shit” moment.

“Holy shit,” I said to myself. “This isn’t a game, or a movie, or anything else. It’s real. I’m here, right now, looking through my eyes.”

I reeled a bit as the sisters from Theta Theta Whatever pulled out their fourth card of the transaction. “I’ve never experienced anything outside of me; I’ve never even seen myself outside of a mirror,” I continued. “I really am Derek Ulster. I’ll never be anyone else, never see from anyone else’s point of view.”

A rising panic clutched at my heart. “My life is real, I’m living it right now, yet I’ve wasted so much of it. I’m wasting it right now! I could die tomorrow. What if this is all there is? I could be watching the sunset on a tropical beach, and instead I’m waiting in line at Metromart for the five-hundredth time in my life!”

“Next please,” the teller cried. The feeling rapidly vanished, and I felt the panic subsiding. Sheepishly, I added a bag of potato chips to my meager basket–a little starch to keep my mind sleepy and listless.

“What are you talking about?”

Sharon tightened her grip on the handset. “You mean you didn’t know someone named Paul Phillips? Someone who passed away about six months ago?”

“No,” the voice on the other end said airily. “Why would I?”

“What about…’millerpond1987?'” Sharon said, mind racing. “I think that was my brother’s screen name.”

“I don’t know anyone with a screen name like that,” said the girl.

“Are you sure? You were on all his contact lists…I even read some of the emails that he sent you!”

“No,” Umbriel said. “This is just too creepy for me…I’m going to hang up now.”

“Wait..!” Sharon received only a dialtone in reply, and slammed the receiver back into its cradle.